Comcast Sued For Punishing Employees With Pies To The Face
from the it's-Comcastic dept
There are so many shitty U.S. companies across tech, energy, and AI that criticism of our massively-unpopular telecom monopolies has fallen out of fashion. It’s easy to forget, for example, that Comcast routinely used to make headlines for setting peoples homes on fire, torturing pets, or at times killing people (most of the stories I used to write about this at DSLReports.com have been deleted after the owner abruptly and unceremoniously shut the website down).
So it feels like a bit of a throwback for Comcast to be under fire once again, this time for hitting low-performing employees in the face with pies. The company is facing a new lawsuit by employees who say one store manager made pies-to-the-face a tradition at a local company store. And encouraged everybody to videotape it:
“A lawsuit against Comcast’s cable division alleges that a store manager humiliated the lowest performing salesperson each month with a strange ritual in which a cream pie was smashed into the employee’s face. The lawsuit claims the store manager took videos of the assaults and ordered employees to participate in the assaults and record their own videos.”
Good times! Very on brand!
The full complaint makes for interesting reading, and includes paragraphs like this one:
“Specifically, for the entire time Plaintiff was employed by the Defendant, Defendant had a policy that the highest-ranked Retail Sales Consultant for the prior month was instructed by his or her supervisor-Ms. Peterson, the Comcast Store manager-to tie the lowest ranked sales consultant for the prior month to a chair in the back office and thereafter assault that person by violently smashing a cream pie in their face.”
In addition to wisely having employees videotape the harassment, the store manager also made sure to document the pies-to-the-face employees received on a store whiteboard.
This is, as somebody who spent decades writing about Comcast for various websites, child’s play when it comes to the width and breadth of poor judgement that can be found at this particular company.
Filed Under: cable, face, motivational, pies, telecom
Companies: comcast
Comments on “Comcast Sued For Punishing Employees With Pies To The Face”
I’m more surprised that one of those pie-to-the-face bits wasn’t immediately followed by a fist-to-the-face response. No job is worth being humiliated like that.
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Wait for the Warner deal to fail and Comcast to buy Paramount.
The lowest performing salesperson would then be David Ellison, and the ritual will become a daily round of cream brûlée pies thrown at him by all Comcast employees.
It would be the very first time that working at Comcast is righteous.
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“tie the lowest ranked sales consultant for the prior month to a chair in the back office”
Yeah, no, you’re not even getting me that far let alone throwing a pie in my face. Who are these people who put up with this kind of abuse masking as a team bonding exercise?
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Why do you think the victim is tied to a chair before the pie-ing begins?
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Oh, I skipped that detail in my reading.
…Jesus Christ, what the fuck.
I’m doubtful they can make this stick to Comcast as an entire organization, since it looks a lot more like a ‘rogue’ manager, but always start by aiming high.
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You always aim for the top. Anything it allows to happen under its watch without corrective action is endorsed at worst and ignored at best. Comcast should’ve stopped this shit before it became lawsuit-worthy.
That darn Brian Roberts...
Someone needs to unleash a CAT5 pie storm into Comcast’s support chatbot servers.
The bot presents a closed end list of topics and God help you if your issue doesn’t fall within the list (which they never do).
Someone convince me that it’s not a design flaw. The bot is working exactly as Brian Roberts planned it. It’s part of his “Customers can Piss Off” initiative
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That’s everywhere now. All over the medical and insurance fields. And another ISP where i used to reach someone sane and competent in Texas or India has been replaced by such a horriffic system plus ppl who have no clue or records when you finally manage to trick the bot into getting you a rep.
Also what’s the deal now that you must wait until the bot finishes speaking before you can respond? Old automated voice systems didn’t suck that hard.
Lawsuit, nothing, the manager should be facing assault charges.
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And considering the victim was tied to a chair, false imprisonment/kidnapping charges might be stretch, but it’d be worth trying to make them stick.
It’s Com-slapstick.
All my homies hate Comcast.
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There are plenty of reasons why they’ve been ranked the most hated and the worst company in America several times over the years.
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I remember when The Consumerist (RIP) awarded them the Worst Company in America “award”. Twice! (It also finished in the “top” three in four other years.)
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I miss the Consumerist.
This is the stick alternative to the pizza party as a carrot tone-deaf management technique.
Transparent
If fees are all about transparency: shouldn’t there be a “asshole boss pie budget” item on your bill?
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You’re right. We’ve been defrauded!
The 500 | Internal Error at the end inadvertently makes the story better.
Pies to the face are out. I guess they’ll have to go back to enemas.
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WTF?
What baffles me is the part about tying them to the chair. Isn’t that false imprisonment?
One thing I KNOW. Try that with me and it won’t end well. Nobody has the right to lay hands on anyone else without their permission, and if you touch me there will be police, because YOU’LL be calling them after I beat your ass.
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Not if they willingly get into the chair to be tied up. Of course, the concept of “willingly” gets cloudy when refusal could leave one unemployed, and most (rarely so absurd) forms of employee abuse have their roots in that.
Since we’re not talking about a country with strong worker protections, that criminal charge would probably go nowhere unless the co-workers forced the victim into the chair.